I run out onto the balcony and scan the area. He can’t have gone far. My apartment complex is in a wilderness of strip malls and parking lots. There are practically no sidewalks. No one walks anywhere anymore. So a person on foot sticks out among the cars like a sore thumb.
After a moment, I see him. He’s already made it onto the main drag, which is six lanes of traffic that never stop. He’s walking toward the highway on-ramp, hauling his suitcase behind him. It’s enough to break your heart.
“David!” I yell. But he’s already too far away to hear me. How did he move so fast?
I run downstairs and jump into my car. Of course, there’s a guy in a pickup truck in front of me taking his sweet time at the exit to my parking lot, and I hit the longest red light in the history of the world as I wait to make my turn. Finally I can go. I gun the engine and race toward the highway, but he’s already gone.
I pull over at the top of the on-ramp. I get out of my car and look up and down the highway. I can see quite far from this little rise. He’s nowhere in sight. Of course not. He’s already been picked up. Some serial killer or child molester has him.
I sit on the hood of my car and proceed to pull my hair out by the roots.
I’ve failed my best friend. And I’ve failed her son. I have no words for the way I feel right now. But if you imagined swallowing a hand grenade, that would probably come close.
“David!” I shriek. I’m not much of a shrieker, but it seems to come naturally now. “David, where are you?”
I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. About fifty feet away, there’s a bus stop, not much more than a sign and a Plexiglas wind shelter. David is so small that he can actually hide behind a signpost. He sticks his head around it.
“What?” he says.
“There you are,” I say. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Away,” he says. “I don’t want to bother you anymore.”
I head over to the bus stop and sit down on the bench inside the shelter. I’m moving slow. I don’t want to spook him, for fear he’ll run out into the traffic or something. I pat the bench. After a moment he sits next to me.
“You’re not bothering me,” I say. “I’m so relieved to see you I could…I don’t know what.”
“You hate kids.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I can tell. You hate me. I can’t help that I was born or that my mom is dead. I don’t know where to go. I want to go back to that lawyer’s place. At least I didn’t ruin his job. I won’t be in the way there. I can stay out of trouble. They don’t mind me there.”
“I don’t mind you either,” I say.
“I lost you eight hundred dollars.”
I look at him, all four feet of him, his thin blond hair blown around his ears by the light breeze kicked up by the traffic.
“So what?” I say. “What’s eight hundred dollars? Money comes and goes, kid. That’s just the way it is. It’s not even that important.”
My dad said that to me about ten thousand times. It occurs to me that maybe he really didn’t have a clue what the hell he was talking about, since more often than not money and he were like oil and water. But it sounds pretty good right now.
And I actually mean it. If all it cost me was eight hundred bucks to get my dad back, or Josie back, or to wipe the hurt look off David’s face right now, wouldn’t I pay it a hundred times over? Money is only the means to an end. It’s not the end itself.
“You’re right that I didn’t plan on having kids,” I say. “You did kinda get dropped on me by surprise.”
“I knew it.” He looks worse than ever.
“But you know what? I’m glad you did.”
“You are? Why?”
“Because,” I say, “you’re bringing out something in me I didn’t know was there. And as annoying as that is, I think it’s good for me.”
He looks at me wide-eyed until he realizes I’m joking about being annoyed.
“You mean it?” he says.
“Yeah. And I’ll tell you another thing,” I say. “From now on until your dad comes, no more poker. For you or for me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. In fact, no more computer, period. It’ll just be you and me doing…whatever it is people used to do before computers. Quilting or chopping wood or whatever.”
“How will you make money?”
I shrug. “I have enough money for now,” I say, which is something I’ve never said in my life.
“What did people use to do before there were computers?” he asks.
“I have no idea,” I say. I think back to my childhood. It’s just a blur of poker games, all-night restaurants and hotel rooms, with the odd stint at my mom’s house thrown in. The question is, what did normal people do before computers? And the problem is, I really don’t know. I’ve never lived a normal life. Not for one minute. And I’m not about to start now.
“I think,” I say, “that they used to go places.”
“Really? Like where?”
“Like probably the zoo,” I say. “Yes, that’s it. In the old days, people used to go to the zoo at least once a week.”
“Is that true?”
“Sure it is. Everyone was on a first-name basis with the animals. The gorillas knew everyone in town.”
“That’s ridiculous,” David says, but he’s smiling.
“And after the zoo, they went camping,” I say. “And then they went bowling. And then they went to something called a park. That’s, like, a big open area with this weird green stuff called grass and these strange tall leafy things called trees.”
“I know what grass and trees are,” David says. He’s giggling now.
“Really? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them before,” I say. “Would you like to go see if we could locate some right now?”
“I’d rather go meet the gorillas,” David says. He hops up and grabs his suitcase.
“Then let’s go,” I say, and we head back to my car, his hand in mine.